John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

One of the most common buzzwords in healthcare right now is “big data.” Everyone is talking about how to leverage big data in healthcare. There is little doubt that there are a whole list of opportunities that are available to healthcare using big data analytics.

When it comes to big data analytics, most people see it as healthcare business intelligence. In other words, how do we take all the data from within the organization and leverage it to benefit the business. Or in the case of a health insurance company, how can we use all the healthcare data that’s available out there to benefit our business. This is really powerful stuff that can’t be ignored. A lot of money can be made/saved by a business that properly leverages the data it holds.

However, I think there’s another side of healthcare big data that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. Instead of calling it big data analytics, I like to call it focused patient analytics.

What is focused patient analytics? It’s where you take relatively small elements from big data that are focused on a specific patient. In aggregate the data that you get is relatively small, but when you consider all of the data is focused around one patient it can be a significant amount of valuable data. Plus, it requires all the healthcare big data silos be available to make this happen. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet, but we will get there.

Imagine how much smarter you could make the EHR if the EHR could tap into the various silos of healthcare data in order to create focused patient analytics. Unfortunately, we can’t even design these type of smart EHR software, because too much of the data is unavailable to EHR software. I love to think about the innovation that would be possible if there was a free flow of data to those that needed it in healthcare.

Certainly there are plenty of security risks and privacy concerns to consider. However, we can’t let that challenge be an excuse for us not to create focused patient analytics that will benefit patients.